Encyclopaedism and Totality in Contemporary Fiction

"Taking as key examples work by Don DeLillo, Leslie Marmon Silko, Roberto Bolaäno, and Karen Tei Yamashita, this book delineates a new trend in recent fiction of looking for new ways to approach 'totality', a trend which reclaims 'totality' as a method for approaching the contemporary, rather than an object to be represented. In this we can find some of the most radical attempts in recent fiction to reimagine our world in the face of an unstable future. Where, to date, major studies of literary encyclopaedism have focused on the West and its canon, this book moves beyond these subjects, examining work by Native American and Latin American authors as well as their North American counterparts. In so doing, it offers an original way of addressing the challenge of reading world literature in a postcolonial context"--